SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: THE OVERVIEW

By PAM BELLUCK; Contributing reporting for this article were David D. Kirkpatrick from Rehoboth; Katie Zezima from Somerville; Tom Marshall from Northampton; and Michael Levenson from Worcester.

Published: May 18, 2004

Correction Appended

BOSTON, May 17—
Hundreds of gay and lesbian couples streamed into city halls from Boston to the Berkshires on Monday as Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriages.

Weddings were held on a hill overlooking a park, in churches and synagogues, in the shoebox quarters of justices of the peace, and on a Christmas tree farm with peacocks, pigs, turkeys and Icelandic sheep nearby.

''Your marriage is an example to others of how life is supposed to work,'' Rosaria E. Salerno, Boston's city clerk, told Joe Rogers and Tom Weikle, choking with emotion as she married the longtime couple in City Hall's first same-sex ceremony Monday morning. ''You really are already married. The only thing that's been wrong with your marriage, if I can put it that way, is that it hasn't been public. And this is so exciting because the moment I put my name on that piece of paper, your marriage is public.''

Gay rights advocates hailed this day, which fell on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, as an occasion that evoked the triumphs -- and the social vindication -- of the civil rights era.

After an emotional court and legislative battle, Massachusetts now joins a tiny list of places where same-sex couples can marry -- Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. Same-sex couples have been issued marriage licenses in San Francisco and Multnomah County, Ore., but those licenses have not been state-sanctioned and are the focus of legal battles.

On the first day here, the issuing of licenses and the marriage ceremonies proceeded without many snags or confrontations. It was unclear how many same-sex couples sought licenses here Monday, but at least 900 couples showed up in 29 of the state's 351 cities and towns, according to town clerks and the office of the secretary of the commonwealth.

There were small demonstrations by opponents of gay marriage -- and camera crews from a national conservative organization, the Family Research Council, gathered images to use in anti-gay marriage presentations.

But the seeds of a full-fledged conflict were planted on Monday by scores of out-of-state couples who came to Massachusetts to apply for marriage licenses despite Gov. Mitt Romney's refusal to allow gay men and lesbians from other states to marry here. The governor has said that a 1913 state law, adopted in part to block interracial marriages, forbids Massachusetts from marrying anyone who cannot be legally married in their home state.

At least four communities -- Provincetown, Somerville, Worcester and Springfield -- decided to defy Governor Romney and issue out-of-state couples marriage licenses even if they said on their application that they had no intention of moving to Massachusetts.

''No matter who you are or where you come from, if you fill out this application you will be given a license to marry,'' Mayor Joseph Curtatone of Somerville, just north of Boston, said on the steps of City Hall, where at least a fifth of the more than 40 couples came from other states, including two couples who arrived on the $10 bus from Chinatown in New York.

''Those of you from out of state, welcome to Somerville,'' the mayor said.

Officials in those towns could face fines or criminal charges for violating Governor Romney's edict.

And the out-of-state couples who flocked to those communities on Monday face the prospect that Governor Romney will invalidate their marriages. They also face -- some of them willingly -- possible legal battles in their home states if they seek to have their marriage recognized or to apply for benefits accorded married couples.

Governor Romney, a Republican who had tried to delay same-sex marriage until a state constitutional amendment could come before voters in November 2006, issued a two-sentence statement: ''All along, I have said an issue as fundamental to society as the definition of marriage should be decided by the people. Until then, I intend to follow the law and expect others to do the same.''

Thirty-nine states have laws defining marriage as a heterosexual union. On Monday, the attorneys general of two neighboring states without such laws -- Connecticut and Rhode Island -- issued statements about how they would treat their residents who married in Massachussetts.

Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, issued a two-part opinion that said state law forbids same-sex couples from marrying in Connecticut, but it stopped short of saying whether residents who wed across the border in Massachusetts should be denied marital status at home.

Mr. Lynch said ''validly performed'' marriages in other states would be recognized unless they contradicted the state's public policy.

New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had issued a similar opinion, and, despite the uncertainty, Cris Goldman-Beam and Robin Goldman-Beam of Manhattan came to Somerville on the Chinatown bus, saying they were not worried about legal challenges to the marriage license they applied for in Massachusetts.

Correction: May 19, 2004, Wednesday A front-page headline yesterday about the opening of Massachusetts to same-sex marriages referred imprecisely to couples who took advantage of it. While hundreds applied for licenses, only those couples granted a waiver of a three-day waiting period were able to marry.